Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [97]
You can. He felt her, knew she was there with him. Luke, don’t give up …
He couldn’t levitate. In the corridor he heard Ugbuz swear, Krok yell, “That way, Captain …”
Feet thundered away. Rung by rung, one aching drop at a time, Luke descended, the shaft falling away bottomlessly below him. He felt the warmth of her, the awareness, beside him every agonizing meter of the way.
Deck 6 was utterly dark. The dead air stank of Jawas, of oil, of insulation, of Luke’s own sweat as he dragged himself along its lightless corridors, his shadow and Threepio’s lurching like drunkards in the dim flicker of the glowrods on his staff. Even those were failing—he’d have to cannibalize a power cell from somewhere and the thought of that niggling little chore made his whole aching body revolt. Ahead of him, and in all directions, he heard the squeak and scuffle of Jawa feet, saw the firebug glimmer of their eyes.
Threepio, he thought. They’ll be after Threepio if I pass out.
Now and then he smelled, and heard, the Talz, and breathed a sigh of thanks that the Sand People, being essentially conservative, would defend their own territory rather than explore new corridors at this stage of the game.
Everywhere he saw torn-out panels, looted wiring, SPs and MSEs lying gutted and derelict along the walls. Helmets, plates, dismantled blasters and ion mortars strewed the halls—Luke checked the weapons and found that, one and all, they’d had their power cells pulled. Limping painfully down the echoing blackness, Luke had the eerie sensation of being trapped in the gut of a rotting beast, a zombie killer still bent on destruction though its body was being eaten from within.
This section of Deck 6 was dead to the Will. No wonder Callista had directed him here.
Cray. Somehow they had to rescue Cray. She’d know how to cope with the Will, know how to disable the artificial intelligence that ruled this metal microcosm.
Sixteen hundred hours. His whole body felt on the verge of collapse. Somehow he’d have to get enough rest to get up the lift shaft tomorrow. Thirteen levels. His mind flinched from the thought. They ricochet blaster bolts down the shaft …
“Callista …”
But there was no reply.
I exist side by side with the Will.
She had died in the computer core. Luke had seen how the spirit of the Jedi could detach itself from the physical body, could imbue itself in other things, as Exar Kun’s had imbued the stones of Yavin.
Knowing she had disabled the automatic trigger—knowing the Empire might very well send an agent to trigger the Eye manually—she had stayed in the gunnery computers for thirty years, guarding the entry to the machine that had taken her life, a fading ghost keeping watch on a forgotten battlefield.
“Come on, Threepio,” he said, and bent to retrieve a hank of cable from the corpse of a gutted MSE. “Let’s find ourselves a terminal.”
———
>On Chad< Callista said, the letters fading in slowly as a single paragraph, as if rising whole from the depths of her recollection, >if our ark were in wystoh territory—and wystoh hunt most of the deep oceans where our ranch was—and we had to make a hull repair, or go out to the herd to help an off-season calving, we’d send out something called a foo-twitter the night before, a floater that made some kind of hooting or tweeting. Since wystoh are frantically territorial, they’d all head for the thing—which by then would be kilometers from the ark—and that would give Papa or me or Uncle Claine a chance to do what we had to do in open water and get back to safety. Would the Klaggs respond to a foo-twitter long enough for you to get up the shaft? They seem pretty territorial to me<
“If it sounded like Ugbuz and the Gakfedds, they would.” Luke leaned back into the heap of blankets and thermal vests Threepio had gathered to make cushions for him in the corner of a repair shop, and considered the screen